'A School for Love'

''Grace is everywhere,'' the French novelist Georges Bernanos has his dying cure exclaim in ''The Diary of a Country Priest,'' and in recent years the American poet Kathleen Norris has been developing a similar point of view. She began to do so in ''Dakota'' (1993), which she called a ''spiritual geography.'' It was a lyrical, documentary homage to a place, but also a modest, telling insistence on immanence: God as present in the world, in the daily rhythms of our particular lives. In the prairie land of the late 20th-century upper Midwest an observant writer found a stoic, introspective dignity, an abundant moral energy. She gave us the voices of people at a substantial distance from our big cities, confident centers of money and learning. She paid attention with knowing devotion to a social and moral landscape; gave grateful respect to the individuals who have clung to it, often against great odds; and rendered what she had witnessed with a meditative intensity and originality worthy of James Agee's response over a half-century ago to Hale County, Ala., or William Carlos Williams's extended examination in verse of Paterson, N.J. -- a tradition of watchfulness and evocation that in form defies literary genres and in content mixes concrete description with spells of soulful inwardness suggestively put into words.

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In ''The Cloister Walk,'' persisting in her wonderfully idiosyncratic ways, she gives us the result of an ''immersion into a liturgical world'' started five years ago, when she began the first of two nine-month terms in a religious and cultural institute at St. John's Benedictine monastery in Minnesota -- though five years earlier she had already become a Benedictine oblate; that is, she had professed monastic vows modified in accordance with her secular life as a married woman, a writer, a sometime lecturer. Raised a ''thorough Protestant,'' and not especially knowledgeable about Roman Catholic religious orders, she soon experienced in full panoply the ''solemnities and feasts,'' the celebrations of the various saints that took place in a monastery that became, for her, a spiritual home, even though she left it, rather often, for her life in Lemmon, S.D., and for a worshiping commitment there to a Presbyterian church.

As a Benedictine oblate she was a vigorous participant in a world all its own -- one devoted to continual reading, singing, praying: ''a school for love,'' was the phrase St. Benedict used. Such a world is at a jarring remove from that inhabited by the rest of us, who clock in to our jobs and rush headlong from one day's hurdles and tasks to the next's. Ms. Norris reminds us that ''liturgical time is essentially poetic time, oriented toward process rather than productivity, willing to wait attentively in stillness rather than always pushing to 'get the job done.' ''

Nevertheless, monks and nuns and oblates in monasteries are our fellow human beings, and much of this book chronicles the yearnings, worries and, not least, the lusts to which these men and women are heir. Even the saints, the author comes to realize, are not the ''impossibly holy people'' she once thought them to be. They are, she nicely calls them, ''witnesses to our limitations,'' even as they affirm ''God's vast possibilities.'' All the while, more prosaically, these men and women, like the rest of us, struggle for balance and proportion -- best supplied, they seem to have learned, by an earthy humor that undermines the besetting sins that plague some people who are attracted to religious (and academic) life: smugness, pretentiousness. One day at noon prayer time in the monastery, Ms. Norris heard from the text being read aloud to all that St. Therese of Lisieux ''detested the pious trivialities which find their way into religious life,'' and she noticed that Therese's own description of the sisters in her convent as a '' 'fine bunch of old maids' broke everyone up.''

Monastics are people who live close to the bone, materially, who every day try hard to become part of a community -- to relinquish aspects of the very egoism the rest of us spend our lives, in various ways, trying to enhance. They are cloistered people with whom the author was privileged to ''walk,'' as her title says -- alongside them, but not fully one of them. Her primary vow was, after all, matrimonial; theirs is to a celibate life, a willed surrender of some pleasures -- on behalf, we begin to understand, of certain important (and sensual) satisfactions. Ms. Norris is subtle and shrewd on that subject; she shows us how these men and women put themselves, mind and body and soul, into a community's demanding but fulfilling life. We try to understand that life through resort to the psychiatric word ''sublimation.'' But as Ms. Norris points out, there is ''a classic conflict between a psychology that emphasizes individual development, and the Benedictine charism of life lived in community.''

She refers to ''a strong cultural prejudice against celibacy''; it is as if, in her words, ''to channel one's sexuality into anything besides being sexually active is seen as highly suspect; it leaves celibates vulnerable to being automatically labeled as infantile or repressed'' -- even though some of the most distinguished psychoanalysts, among them Freud's daughter, Anna, knew well such a manner of living, one which, actually, Freud himself was trying to comprehend, without pejorative intent, in his ''Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.'' Celibacy can be a kind of sexuality, these Benedictines have long known: a passionate offering of self to others, and with them, to the great Other, all this accomplished through rituals and procedures, through spoken and sung avowals, through (in a phrase of Dorothy Day's) ''the work of the body, the work of the heart.''

Such a life -- one's time here offered to God, to a community whose religious ideals and activities are meant to acknowledge Him -- is obviously not meant for most of us. Yet over the centuries many individuals of great moral courage have lent their voices, their enthusiasm to the furtherance of such communities, or have put themselves in intellectual or personal jeopardy and even lost their lives out of convictions that have radically challenged the materialist assumptions, the secular authority and norms of this or that place or time. They belong in the company of the people who figure prominently in this book: the Hebrew prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah, who dared take on ''principalities and powers''; the early Christian martyrs, whose stories Ms. Norris conveys with a vivid, compelling charm; the anxious and melancholy Psalmists who proposed a soaring, complex wisdom, both joyous and tragic; the self-effacing, pastoral sage St. Benedict, whose level-headed modesty of phrasing barely concealed the complex emotional canniness he strove to communicate; the powerfully prophetic St. Augustine, whose confessional asides and polemical broadsides make many 20th-century psychologists and psychiatrists seem hopelessly naive; and, not least, her fellow poets, upon whom she poignantly calls, now and then, as companions -- John Keats, Emily Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, Czeslaw Milosz and Thomas Merton.

Most of all, naturally, these pages offer the voice of Kathleen Norris, a person of modern sensibility who dares leap across time and space to make the interests and concerns of any number of reflective thinkers her own, and by virtue of her direct, engaging prose. Feisty and moody, stubbornly her own person, she nevertheless has her soul brothers and sisters. Her writing is personal, epigrammatic -- a series of short takes that ironically address the biggest subject matter possible: how one ought live a life, with what purposes in mind. She is one of history's writing pilgrims but also a contemporary American one, boldly willing to forsake any number of cultural fads, trends and preoccupations in favor of this ''walk,'' this searching expedition within herself, courtesy of her Benedictine friends.

Fortunately for the rest of us, she is not completely alone. Her fellow Midwesterner Ron Hansen gave us, a few years ago, the novel ''Mariette in Ecstasy,'' another knowing journey into monastic life; and we have the novelist Reynolds Price, who (in ''A Palpable God'' and in his more recent Gospel translations) has dared explore biblical stories and the reasons for their still gripping hold on us. In these last years of the second millennium, when whirl and whim rule, when there is so much snide and sneering cynicism around (in politics, in the arts, in criticism), these talented visionaries point us in another direction: toward an embrace of moral and spiritual contemplation -- one that is blessedly free of the pietistic self-righteousness increasingly prominent in our present-day civic life.